Political Environment

INTRODUCTION

This paper was completed by a Finance and Management student of the Providenciales Campus from the Turks and Caicos Islands Community College for her Introduction to Political Environment class. This paper looks at Ideologies of the two main political parties in Jamaica and the role of the Opposition in the Turks and Caicos Islands political system.

The importance of this project is to enable one to become familiar with Political Ideologies, Principals and Policies that govern the political arena through the centuries.

Describe the ideologies of the two main political parties in Jamaica

Jamaica, is a country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning 10,990 square kilometres (4,240 sq. mi) in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the fourth-largest island country in the Caribbean. Jamaica have a few political parties, namely they are People’s National Party (PNP), Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Jamaica Labour Party (JLP, The Natural Law Party of Jamaica, the United People’s Party (UPP) and the National Democratic Movement (NDM).

Since the development of mass parties in Jamaica in the early 1940s, the party system has been dominated by the two main political parties, the Jamaica Labour Party (J.L.P.) and the People’s National Party (P.N.P.), who have occupied control of the executive at approximately ten year intervals. Each of the two parties has earned at least forty percent of the aggregate vote in five of the seven parliamentary elections held between 1944 and 1976, despite challenges from a wide variety of small but short-lived political parties. 

Both parties have always been multiclass alliances rather than unified class parties. The policy and ideological differences between these two parties reflect divergent dominant class interests and tendencies in either party. The P.N.P. has from its inception consistently represented a “radical reformist” policy tendency while the J.L.P. has consistently represented a more cautious and “conservative reformist” tendency. 

The dominant founding leadership within the P.N.P. consisted of an upper-middle-class intelligentsia providing second-level leadership to the maximum leader Norman Manley, and Oxford-trained lawyer, humanist and liberal intellectual. Manley was no firebrand socialist but his intellectualism and visionary nationalist commitment attracted into the P.N.P. party alliance all the radical middle-class intelligentsia and leftists of the period, some of whom articulated Marxist notions of socialism. The second level of early P.N.P. leadership was essentially divided between this left-leaning tendency and a center tendency that was nationalist rather than socialist in ideology. Manley straddled the two coalitions with some difficulty until the factions split in 1952, leaving himself and the moderate-nationalist tendency in full command of the party between 1952 and 1969. 

The J.L.P. in its early stages was hardly a political party. It began as a loose alliance of individuals supporting the prominent labor leader of the time, the charismatic Alexander Bustamante3 who happened to be Norman Manley’s cousin. Its effective mass base was the Bustamante Industrial Union and it was really the union converting itself into a party to contest the first universal adult suffrage election in 1944. Its founder leader was a militant antisocialist and demagogic populist who was despised by the P.N.P. intelligentsia as being an unlettered upstart lacking the refinements of middle-class education. The early J.L.P.’s second-level leadership was a mixture of conservative individuals whose common political identity was not ideology nor policy but loyalty to Bustamante. 

Initially the styles and approaches of the two main parties were a study in contrasts. The J.L.P. set the pace in the transition towards clientelistic, pork-barrel, machine politics. It de-emphasized formal organizational structure, relying mainly on clientelistic networks of personal support for its political bosses and particularly on the demagogic crowd appeal of the flamboyant Bustamante. Its message to the masses was the delivery of short-run material benefits and inducements in exchange for support. It reinforced patronage politics with the cement of Bustamante’s charisma and symbolic image of champion of the poor and the downtrodden. While avoiding leftist class rhetoric, Bustamante constantly thrived on adversary class politics by publicly abusing, challenging, and ridiculing the planter-merchant class on behalf of the cause of the masses. Unrestrained class militancy was curiously mixed with ideological conservatism and belief in the free enterprise system, the symbols of empire, British political over lordship, and the need to maintain the existing system of social relations but with necessary economic and social reforms. He skillfully used religion to berate socialism and Marxism as anti-Christian evils. 

The P.N.P. tried initially to develop along the lines of the British Labour Party which it regarded as its model. It established dues paying community party groups in the respective electoral constituencies which elected delegates to an annual conference. It attempted to encourage grass roots participation in party life and to promote political education among its activists. Conversion to the nationalist cause and to socialist notions of change was placed on equal footing with winning votes. The party leader, Manley, self-consciously attempted to create a genuine democratic party structure in contrast to the oligarchic J.L.P. and the authoritarian personal power with which Bustamante ran the J.L.P. as if it were his private estate. In order to compete with the populist style of Bustamante, which captivated the masses in the initial stages, Manley was gradually molded into a populist leader through his immense gift of eloquent oratory.

A process of organizational convergence born of the pressures of competition completed the evolution of the two parties by the late 1950s. The P.N.P. copied the personalist and clientelism of the J.L.P. while the J.L.P. imitated the formal organizational structures of the P.N.P. when it went into opposition in 1955 under the direction of a new group of upper-middle-class, second-level leadership. The J.L.P. established local party branches within the electoral constituencies and an annual conference like the P.N.P. in which constituency delegates elected party officials. Like the P.N.P. it created a central secretariat that functioned to coordinate party activities between elections. What began as a cadre party of notables unified around a dominant political boss and existing only at election periods was now restructured in the image of a mass party. Traces of the earlier authoritarian cadre structure of the J.L.P. still persist. Leaders are still personally recruited by the party leader from among notables and elites outside the membership of the party. Unifying party principles, policies, and ideology remain very weak and undeveloped except in so far as party positions are articulated in opposition to the P.N.P. and socialism. Democratic procedures are constantly violated with impunity at the whim of the party leader.5 The grass roots and formal community branch structures remain largely undeveloped except for a few constituencies. 

While the J.L.P. has been wedded to ideological acceptance of the capitalist free enterprise basis of the economy, the P.N.P. has consistently articulated a Democratic-Socialist line supporting greater state ownership and intervention in the economy and nationalization of important foreign owned industries. The P.N.P. has tried consistently over the years to bring to the party arena and its agenda of issues intellectual currents of left-of-center ideas derived from the wider international arena of anticolonial political and social movements, while the J.L.P. has tended to be parochial, nonintellectual, and inward-looking in its policy thinking. As a result, the P.N.P. adopts more of the approach of political missionaries seeking to convert the society to radical visions of transformation. The I. L. P., in contrast, is more incrementalism and cautious in seeking short-term adjustments and reforms that tinker with the existing political system and social order rather than prescribe fundamental changes. The P.N.P.’s approach to nationalism is consequently cosmopolitan, regional, outward-looking, and Third World-oriented, while the J.L.P. is essentially localist and parochial in its concept of nationalism. 

The P.N.P., in the current period, has therefore promoted basic value changes and structural changes in its social policies including worker participation in industry, cooperative ownership of land and capital, the democratization of the management of educational institutions, and greater grass roots participation in public life through revitalized local level community councils. The basis of these initiatives is a constant search for new, experimental, and innovative concepts through which to transform the society according to more up-to-date and progressive models of sociopolitical development. The P.N.P. has therefore been the driving force behind the independence movement and the principal advocates of institutional change in the political system. The J.L.P.’s focus has been more on the attempt to maximize growth and material benefits operating within the constraints and parameters of the social system and power structure as it exists. 

Underlying these contrasting visionary and pragmatic approaches to public policy are vastly differing views of political and social reality that are embedded in the traditions of the two parties developed over a thirty-year period of involvement in public life. The P.N.P. intelligentsia view the Jamaican social system as capable of responding to fundamental social engineering and policy experimentation, and as capable of evolving new patterns of development similar to those emerging in countries experiencing currents of socialist and leftist change. The P.N.P. sees the folk traditions of the Jamaican people as sufficiently flexible to adapt to new ideas and to assimilate novel approaches to problem solving. The J.L.P.’s pragmatism is rooted in a deep respect for the existing folk traditions and methods of community and individual problem solving, and a fear that idealistic and millenarian expectations may simply trigger chaos or confusion, or be misunderstood and create illusions of change without solving the underlying problems, while raising expectations for better and more satisfying solutions. Essentially, the underlying difference between the two main parties lies in the J.L.P. pragmatism and conservatism and P.N.P. liberalism and belief in leftist social engineering. In consequence, although the P.N.P. has never been a Marxist party, it has attracted Marxists and has allied itself to Marxist fringe groups. 

The J.L.P. has always represented a curious coalition of conservative business interests clinging to the party out of fear of P.N.P. socialism and the trade union leaders from the B.I.T.U. The paradoxical union-business alliance produced leaders, some of whom favored left-of-center welfare and social policies to benefit the poor peasantry and the working class, and others who believed in the primacy of the interests of business and the subordination of all other interests. Because of the loosely knit character of the J.L.P. leadership, its anti-intellectualism, pragmatism, and reluctance to formulate sweeping ideological principles to govern its policies in government, the J.L.P. leadership has never been divided into ideological factions. J.L.P. factions are based on personalist coalitions supporting competing challenges for top party leadership. J.L.P. governments have therefore reflected a wider diversity of policy tendencies among its government ministers than the P.N.P. Unlike the P.N.P., all the J.L.P. top leaders have been ideologically conservative with the result that policy approaches under the J.L.P. have been more right than left of center.

It is important to understand the historical roots of the divergent ideological tendencies between the parties and the dynamic class forces that account for them. The J.L.P. began as a worker’s movement seeking to provide a party expression for its preeminent and popular trade union base. Its incrementalism view of change was rooted in the low level of class consciousness of its mass base which articulated angered militancy towards the capitalists but had no aspirations for state power, ownership, their main concern was with a better distribution of income and the control of the means of production or a strong sense of class solidarity. nation of certain rights of trade union representation as workers. Essentially, the working class saw state power and institutions as alien to their interests but awesome in the degree to which their mastery demands an understanding of the culture of the colonizer which they did not possess.  Their political mood was one of populist distrust of and alienation towards distant governmental institutions. This naturally lent itself to the flamboyant populist and demagogic leadership of the J.L.P.’s founder-leader, Bustamante, whose style reflected the populist oppositionist tendency of the working class. 

The P.N.P., on the other hand, started as a nationalist movement representing a middle-class challenge for the wresting of control of the state institutions from the colonizer. Unlike the J.L.P., its initial focus was therefore on access to and control over state power and on political rights for the masses. Its more highly educated upper-middle-class top leadership symbolized both a higher level of status respectability than the lower-middle-class J.L.P. top leadership, and a greater capability in the mastery of the culture of the colonizer. Its more political orientation -demanded a more fully articulated political ideology which was expressed through the framework of the Fabian Socialism it embraced. Its appeal was therefore strongest among the more educated, informed and politicized sectors of the subordinate classes. In the course of attempting to build a mass base to compete with the J.L.P., it developed its own working-class trade union arm which in the early period articulated the rhetoric and symbolism of socialism. As the P.N.P. mass base developed between 1944 and independence, it became distinguishable from that of the J.L.P. as it successfully mobilized the more ideologically radical, informed and politicized sections of the working class and small peasantry. Its strong appeal to the middle peasantry and rural middle class converted the national farmers organization, the Jamaica Agricultural Society, (J.A.S.), into a strong ally of the P.N.P. party. In such parishes as St. Ann in Manchester, where the J.A.S. was strong, the P.N. P. established a hegemony over the small peasant vote. 

Like the J.L.P. which later acquired strong big capitalist support because of its antisocialist response to the P.N.P.’s challenge, the P.N.P. also developed a dual class tendency. It combined the nationalist aspirations of the respectable middle class with working-class and peasant radicalism inspired by the activist and left-of-center leadership in the P.N.P. party. The J.L.P., on the other hand, combined ideologically conservative but militant working-class and peasant support with big capitalist backing complemented by firm petty capitalist and antisocialist tendencies in the lower sections of the social structure.